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Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
@shellenberger
Oct 16, 2022 • 21 tweets • 7 min read • Read on X
People like the idea of solar farms in the abstract, but hundreds of communities around the world are currently fighting them because they require 300-600x more land than other energy sources, produce 300x more toxic waste, and devastate critical wildlife habitats.
Many rich nations dump used solar panels and batteries on poor African nations

nytimes.com/2019/05/12/cli…
Other rich nations send used solar panels to "landfills where in some cases, they could potentially contaminate groundwater with toxic heavy metals such as lead, selenium and cadmium."

latimes.com/business/story…
By 2035 there will be 3x more used solar panels than new ones, which will make them 4x more expensive.
"The economics of solar," wrote Harvard Business Review researchers, "would darken quickly as the industry sinks under the weight of its own trash."

hbr.org/2021/06/the-da…
Solar farms are killing the critically threatened desert tortoises. "A team of biologists relocated 139 tortoises from their habitat to make way for the solar panels...In a span of a few weeks, 30 tortoises were killed."

reviewjournal.com/news/science-a…
Wind turbines chop the wings off of big, endangered, slow-to-reproduce birds. "USGS scientists concluded that if anticipated growth in wind energy by 2040 occurs, increased turbine-caused deaths could cut golden eagle populations by half over 10 years."

apnews.com/article/scienc…
After wind turbines spend decades killing threatened species, their blades are sent to landfills because it's too expensive to recycle them. (That little object in the upper right of the photo is a tractor burying the blades.)

bloomberg.com/news/features/… Image
Communities around the world are fighting back against the imposition of environmentally-destructive solar and wind projects by bankers, coastal elites, and subsidy-farmers. Over 40 townships have blocked or restricted projects in Ohio alone this year.

realclearenergy.org/articles/2022/…
If you would like to fight one of these hideous, environmentally-destructive projects in your own community, you can reach out to @LinowesLisa who is organizing a worldwide movement that is successfully fighting back.

wecprotect.org
We must ban all solar panels imported from China. They are being made by incarcerated Uyghur Muslims against whom genocide is being committed. They're cheap because they're made with slave labor. The subsidy for solar is blood money.

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/ban-chinese-…
michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/china-made-s…
It's easy to calculate the massive impact of solar and wind projects. Just draw a circle around an energy project and divide by the amount of electricity they produce. Here are calculations from around the world.

environmentalprogress.org/power-density-…
The low energy density of sunlight and wind is why solar and wind projects require so much land and mining. It's why they can't power a high-energy civilization. And it's why the end of the renewables craze is near.

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/end-of-renew…
What about batteries? Also made by enslaved Muslims in China. For fundamental moral reasons, we must ban all solar panels and batteries made in China.

nytimes.com/2022/06/20/bus…
Rainforests are being ravaged for the toxic elements required for renewables and batteries

apnews.com/article/techno…
environmentalprogress.org/big-news/2017/…
forbes.com/sites/michaels…
forbes.com/sites/michaels…
latimes.com/local/californ…
Q: What about the waste from other sources of energy like nuclear?

A:

Why do people even put solar panels on land when they should go on rooftops? Because rooftop solar is ~2x more expensive

But I agree we should:

1. Ban large-scale solar
2. Ban Chinese solar genocide panels
3. Require solar developers to pay the cost of long-term waste disposal

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More from @shellenberger

Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Nov 21
I am concerned about the impact of social media on children, but this bill is a Trojan horse to create digital IDs, which is a giant leap into the totalitarian dystopia depicted in "Black Mirror," and already in place in China. And @AlboMP has proven censorial and untrustworthy.
Spot on:

Very concerning

Read 7 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Nov 18
Lovers of free speech just scored victories in the US, EU, and Ireland. But now we’re in pitched battles in Britain & Australia, which is at dire risk of trying to censor the entire planet. This is about all of us, so I’m flying down. Share this to show solidarity. LFG!!! Image
I am headed directly to Canberra to meet with other free speech lovers and the wise and just representatives of the Australian people, who I am confident will kill the @AlboMP governments aggressive and hostile assault on the freedom that enables democracy and all other freedoms.

Australia belongs to its people and it is up to them and their representatives to decide whether they want to remain a liberal democratic nation or instantaneously become a totalitarian one.

But it is the duty of friends of Australia to bluntly warn that @AlboMP is pushing a censorship law that would not only end free speech for Australians but also be viewed as a hostile assault on the free Internet worldwide by people in other nations, including in the US, its best ally.

x.com/shellenberger/…
@AlboMP Here is the text from the law that makes clear that the @AlboMP censorship law would apply to the entire global Internet.
Read 5 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Nov 17
Trump's nominees are weird, say elites. But it was the elites' weird ideas that caused wars, addiction/OD crisis, Covid lockdowns, trans madness, censorship, and worse. Trump's nominees trigger the covert narcissism of elites who are rightly defensive at their appalling record.
Democrats act like they’re starting to get it, but they’re not. Their problems are all much worse than they realize. It’s not just that the Party is leaderless. It’s that the Party and the establishment institutions upon which it relies are discredited with half the country and are about to become more discredited with even more Americans as the truth fully comes out about censorship, Covid, weaponization of government, the transgender medical mistreatment scandal, and much else that the media and elites have lied about over the last 20 years. The media isn’t what people thought it was. It was never a reflection of reality. It was a reality distortion machine and propaganda industry in service of maintaining the narrow interests and power of a tiny group of decadent and psychologically disordered elites and their deeply deformed, dishonest institutions. Some might be reformed but others are too far gone to be saved.

x.com/RNCResearch/st…
This is the kind of unAmerican garbage that Democrats made pervasive. It will take many years to root it all out from our institutions.

Read 5 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Nov 16
The media says Trump's nominees are dangerous, but they're not. Their positions and priorities are well within the mainstream. The threat they pose isn't to the American people, it's to the pathocrats who created and worsened our border, public health, and foreign policy crises. Image
Over the last few years, the American people have come to believe that our establishment institutions are at least partly responsible for a series of self-inflicted wounds. Our health and medical establishment either failed to address or enabled declining life expectancy, a mental health crisis including an addiction epidemic, and a botched response to Covid. Our military and foreign policy establishment unnecessarily started and prolonged war and conflict in the Middle East and violated civil liberties at home in the name of fighting terrorism. And liberalized migration laws have depressed working-class wages, swamped the ability of cities to absorb the new migrants, and created a humanitarian disaster on the border.

Given all of that, the President-elect Donald Trump’s nominations make sense. As Border Czar, Thomas Homan will take strong action to close the southern border and deport criminals. National Director of Intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard will bring greater skepticism to foreign military entanglements and calls to restrict civil liberties for national security. And Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. will stand up to the corporations that most everyone agrees have put self-interest before the public’s interest on everything from drug safety to food quality.

We shouldn’t be surprised that some of them hold views that many of us disagree with. The main criticism of Trump’s nominees is that they have dangerous and fringe views. Homan said he would deport whole families. Gabbard said the Russian-backed Syrian dictator was not America’s enemy. And Kennedy espouses marginal and unsubstantiated views on everything from nuclear power to 5Gs.

But Homan has made clear his focus will be on deporting criminals, not families, whatever one thinks of Gabbard’s position on the Syrian conflict, it’s obvious from the context that she made her remarks in service of her loyalty to the US, not Russia, and Kennedy has said, repeatedly, that he won’t ban vaccines.

And throughout history, most real reformers and innovators have held fringe views and have had aspects of their personalities that are problematic. In most cases, those flaws or idiosyncrasies proved to be a small price to pay for their willingness to overcome the many obstacles required to achieve serious reforms of deeply entrenched institutions. This is true not just of Homan, Gabbard, and Kennedy, but also of Defense Secretary and Attorney General nominees, Pete Hegseth and Matt Gaetz, respectively. The accusations the media has made against the two men are so far unsubstantiated by the available evidence.

And none of the allegedly wrong views or bad deeds of Trump’s nominees outweigh the potential of the nominees to reform the institutions that are directly responsible for the invasion of Iraq, prolonged occupation of Afghanistan, entanglement in foreign conflicts, corporate capture of the FDA, the weaponization of government, Covid school closures, authoritarian and gratuitous Covid vaccine mandates, unhealthy diets, the addiction crisis that kills 100,000 Americans per year, the humanitarian disaster along the border, and the mistreatment of children with pseudoscientific transgender medicine.

Strong leaders committed to reforming America’s military and foreign policy establishment, its public health, food, and medical establishments, and its immigration and border security establishment are precisely what the American people wanted when they voted for Trump. If those nominees pursue destructive agendas in lieu of doing their jobs, we will be the first to call them out for it. But the establishment has no ground on which to stand...

Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning reporting, read the rest of the article, and watch the rest of the video!
😂

Read 4 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Nov 15
Over the last decade, Democrats & the media said that those of us who opposed DEI, racial quotas, and open borders had gone “far right.” We hadn’t. Rather, Democrats and the media had gone far left. We are only now emerging from 10+ years of extreme, psychopathic gaslighting. Image
Make no mistake: it was the mainstream news media that induced the mass psychosis that radicalized Democrats into believing that the US had somehow become *more* racist, against all available evidence. Image
The media did this. The mass brainwashing came from college-educated elites in control of the most powerful propaganda machine in world history. They got Democrats to believe the ludicrous view that their fellow Americans had somehow become secretly racist, practically overnight. Image
Read 13 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Nov 14
None of @RobertKennedyJr 's views "have any value whatsoever," say the media. But even the author admits RFK's right about fluoride, raw milk, and the danger of Big Pharma. Elites are freaking out because they know RFK will hold them accountable for their gross abuses of power. Image
This article is downright nasty: "But RFK Jr. is indeed a grade-A crank. Why should he have input on anything?"

Anything? Really?

"Let’s not pretend that Kennedy’s views have any value whatsoever."

The author is guilty of the obnoxious and over-the-top rhetoric he accuses @RobertKennedyJr of.

I don't agree with RFK about nuclear and vaccines, but it's wrong and gratuitously malicious to say Kennedy's views have no "value whatsoever" and to suggest he shouldn't have "input on anything."

Even the author admits that RFK is right about excess corporate power. "I’m ready to acknowledge the merit of Kennedy’s frequent claim that medical regulators are beset by conflicts of interest."

But then the author completely misrepresents his views, saying "Kennedy sounds less like a reformer and more like someone trapped in a web of conspiracy."

That's just false. Kennedy's views of Big Pharma are little different from the conventional, Ralph Nader-influenced views of the Democratic Party from 1962 to 2016.

Kennedy is criticizing the revolving door between Big Pharma and the government, which is the opposite of a "conspiracy" or a "theory."

RFK's whole problem with the revolving door is that it's legal and right out in the open, i.e., the opposite of a conspiracy, which is secret and (usually) illegal.

It is notable that the author never mentions the disastrous Covid lockdowns, abusive vaccine mandates, and other abuses of medical power.

His entire focus is to attack the people who rightly denounced the over-reaction.

The author is particularly disrespectful toward two of the people who were most right about the disastrous Covid lockdowns — @DrJBhattacharya @MartyMakary @VPrasadMDMPH — and most courageous in speaking out against them.
The author can't keep his own argument straight. He says Kennedy is wrong about everything — and then agrees with him on three things, one of which, corporate oversight and accountability, is at the center of Kennedy's career.

The author then claims that "Neither Makary nor Prasad responded to requests for comment for this story" before saying that, in fact, one of them did: "Bhattacharya wrote back to say that “politically minded doctors” such as myself “have done much damage to public confidence in public health.'”

That's some amazingly blatant "medical misinformation" coming from a magazine that has been one of the main advocates for government censorship of "medical misinformation" on X and other social media platforms.

The unhinged quality of the article may be explained because the author is rightly triggered at the possibility that politically-minded doctors, journalists, and the medical establishment upon which both groups depend may finally be held accountable for their role in the disastrous Covid lockdowns and authoritarian vaccine mandates.Image
Image
Read 9 tweets

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